Don't you just hate railroading? ugh.
Don't you just hate railroading? ugh.
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Please be advised that if you use the connect app, it doesn't always correctly parse links to lemmy posts. If they're not working for you, you can follow the whole plotline on my site. (These comics are in reverse chronological order, so start at the end and work backwards.)
It's not really a "house" - It's Kolat Towers. Kolat Towers is a pair of wizard towers surrounded by a small compound. There's a lot of spare rooms.
Reading your comics has accidentally become part of my daily routine, and one of my most favorite at that. Konsi is so cute, and her and Razira are especially cute and wholesome together. Thanks for brightening up my days like this.
Sadly, we are going to run out in (counts) fifteen comics - at which point I'll be posting these a lot less frequently, but I'll still be making them :)
Fortunately, in October... I'll be drawing a Konsi every day for Gobtober.
Impatient for Gobtober then!
Saaaaame I love them so much. I favorited the author in my Lemmy app so I can jump right to it in the morning 😁
fuck yeah
These are my fave part of lemmy
They already lived together huh...
So they were roommates?
Oh god they were roommates!
Heh... well, the party uh... "acquired" Kolat towers, a pair of wizard towers with a large attached compound - and converted the place into a home base. Kolat towers has enough space to house about 50 people comfortably.
Funnily enough railroading doesn't really bug me if it's done in more broad strokes
Basically the players talk about their goals with the campaign in session zero and the railroad is basically the road trip getting the stuff the players want to do done
The broad strokes are things defined beforehand but the finer details are purely up to the players
So basically a wandering road trip rather than a railroad
"Railroading" is often used overbroadly to the point of meaninglessness. My title here is supposed to be poking fun at that a little.
As a negative term "railroading" is supposed to refer to when you actively prevent the players from exploring or doing something they want to do, and that should work, because it doesn't follow a set path you've planned out:
Example: you plan for a villain to taunt the characters, fight them briefly, and then escape. The players do better in the combat than you expected, and would have removed all his HP, so you bump the HP up, then on his turn have him cast dimension door to escape. When a character counterspells the dimension door, you give him counterspell to counter that counterspell. When a second counterspell happens, you have one of his mooks pull out a scroll of counterspell and use it... Because you need him to escape for your plot, so you force it.
That's negative railroading. It's much better to let them succeed, then alter your plans for future sessions accordingly. Maybe there's more to the evil scheme than just this one guy, maybe they won the day and stopped the threat and the next arc is something else (and maybe you can re-use that dungeon you already planned out)
It's perfectly okay, and in fact often a good idea, to plan out the broad strokes of your story in advance, you need to plan something and you can't plan for everything - so having a good idea of what's coming is usually the right move - it's only bad if you refuse to let the story go to other places.
My friend you put that exceptionally
Yesterday, I had a bad session, and I wish to have a second opinion.
There is railroading, a concept that you talked a lot about, and I wish to present to your wisdom this new concept that I will call : gagging.
Gagging is when a DM... talks to much. Maybe it's describing every single action and consequence, maybe it's overdescripting areas and people, maybe it's not letting the players talk enough when it's their time, it's something in between these 3 and more.
Every player know not to interrupt the DM. So that also means that as the DM, you might want to consider if what you are saying matters enough, interests the players, is required or not, and if your players are receptive to it to some degree.
I think it's a bigger problem whenever a DM is following a module... badly. By badly, I mean they want to convey everything the module tells them to convey, but they also try to put their spin on it, making them talk more hesitantly, slower, with more pauses. If they would just read the descriptions aloud, it would be smoother and faster. If it were their creation, they probably could give details and descriptions easier since it's theirs. But when DMs try to go in between and don't prepare enough, it makes every description a crawl that you stop listening to midpoint because you know it won't really matter enough to force yourself to listen to it.
The main point of gagging as a concept to me is not so much to force players down a specific path without their input, as railroading is more or less that but with nuances, but more a way to keep the players from talking and inputing their choices, dialog or interactions into the game.
Since DMs have the mike when they talk, and since interrupting them is taboo (which I fully agree with), it then becomes very important to weight what they say and how they say it in a way that don't turn players off.
And yes, yesterday I had what I would call a gagging DM. It wasn't the first session with them, but probably the last, as I lost complete interest in the campaign. Not only because of the gagging of course. But it fucking sucks for me to leave a campaign in which I had some amount of fun, but not enough to stick around.
She may live in her house, but they're still in different rooms (for now) so they technically each have their own place. Which means Razira asked a valid question, more or less.
I didn't realize until now that this is your work, very well done!
But... what is railroading here ?
Just a little joke.
"Railroading" is when the DM of your game removes choices, or only gives you once choice for where the story is going next. Because "your place" and "my place" are the same place, the joke is that this is a railroad story - it's just a joke, not serious.
Huh. Okay. I missed that joke sorry with the title. But yeah, thank you, I know what railroading is.
There being a landlord dynamic in this fictional relationship makes it way less cute. The real enchantment was the threat of homelessness all along.
The idea that Konsi would kick someone out on the street is pretty far-fetched.
That doesn't mean Razira wouldn't feel disadvantaged or pressured to react a certain way in the power dynamic. It doesn't have to do with Konsi's internal dialogue. This has been established for reason most commonly in lawsuits dealing with sexual harassment between supervisors and their reporting employees.
Maybe there are good renters protections. Maybe property is so plentiful that rent is less than a loaf of bread and no one is homeless. It's a light hearted fantasy comic. Your hatred for landlords doesn't need to be applied to all things.
What threat of homelessness? Razira is a paladin, she can, and is expected to, live out of temples and strongholds of her order. Besides there are much bigger power dynamics of you really care about that sorta thing. Konsi literally talks to razira's god, and they both know it.
They both believe that the other one has higher rank and standing. Konsi's wrong. :)
